A country bumpkin comes to Kampala and revives a dying musical genre
Bosco Katala (literally, country bumpkin), a stocky, hardworking middle-aged fellow trying to make a living in the modern city, is so naive that he takes his bicycle through metal detectors and up escalators. But nothing can dampen his resolve to put dinner on his young family’s table. ILLUSTRATION | JOHN NYAGAH | NMG
A combination of talent and skill from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic has come together to rejuvenate a music genre that was fast fading into obscurity.
Once in a long while, an artistic production captures the imagination of a society. And there is no predicting where it will come from.
In Uganda today, it has come in form of a TV commercial for a telco. The country’s mobile phone giant MTN wanted to promote a product called MoMo that allows customers to make cashless payments.
Three weeks ago, it released an advert that not only fulfilled that purpose, it became an instant hit, the song of the season.
The sheer simplicity of The Story of Bosco, as the song/advert is called, is the secret of its success.
Far from the funky contemporary music created by young artistes who borrow from everywhere including Nigeria in recent times, Bosco is done in the old, old kadongo kamu (one guitar) genre that the first Ugandans to record music in the 1950s favoured.
It featured a one-man band playing an acoustic guitar and basically reciting a story of love griot style for several minutes without repeating a line.
By sheer genius or luck or both, a creative mind at an advertising outfit called TBW created the character of Bosco Katala (literally, country bumpkin), a stocky, hardworking middle-aged fellow trying to make a living in the modern city, so naive that he takes his bicycle through metal detectors and up escalators. But nothing can dampen his resolve to put dinner on his young family’s table.
While Bosco’s video connects with everybody who is struggling to make an honest living, it is the sound of the music that immediately resonates with the Ugandan ear.
Apparently the kadongo kamu that our parents loved so much was silently passed on via cultural DNA. How else do you explain a teenager liking the sound of Bosco immediately?
Did I say where the first Ugandans to record music in the 1950s went? Nairobi, the capital city of neighbouring Kenya.
And it is to Nairobi that the creators of Bosco went in July 2018 to seek out a production wizard called Tosh Gitonga.
In the complex world of film production, the Kenyan director works with a top Kampala production company called Swangz – who executed the script, executed by artistes selected by a talent management group called Xtreme Casting.
So the hit musical advert was actually a regional effort, which also included Congolese talent. The guitar that awakened our kadongo kamu DNA was played by one Monsieur Charmant, a Ugandan of Congolese origin who came to the country as a refugee in 2004. It thus took an ethnic Congolese to get Ugandans to rediscover kadongo kamu!
But why so much song and dance about a commercial, you may ask? Well, long before Charmant was born, his long-departed compatriot, the great Franco Luambo Makiadi, played several commercial songs like AZDA, which simply meant Association Zairoise d’Automobile – a car dealership that was selling Volkswagen in Zaire.
And of course Tabu Ley had even earlier played Savon Omo, another hit advertising the ubiquitous detergent.
And so a combination of talent and skill from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic has come together to rejuvenate a music genre that was fast fading into obscurity.
Joachim Buwembo is a social and political commentator based in Kampala.
